I've never used a tablet before, and I think I have it narrowed down to two models: Wacom Intuos Pen, and Wacom Intuos Small Pen & Touch. Small is good ... but can anyone who has tried one explain about the "Touch" functionality and whether it is a good thing? The price difference between the two is around ten pounds. Also, I am a Linux user (Slackware) - has anyone successfully got either of these working, or failed to?

I searched on Amazon UK for "Wacom Intuos Pen Small" and these were the two first results - the URL is a bit long to paste here.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

I use a Wacom Pen (without touch) on Ubuntu flavors. They work fine if you just want to use them to skritter. If the difference is just ten pounds and money isn't a huge problem for you I'd just spend a little more for a little more functionality.

I bought a wacom bamboo with touch and use it on linux. Believe it or not, the very first thing i do when the computer boots is disable the touch feature:
xsetwacom --set 10 touch off

On Fedora linux the device works fairly right. Just like you, I figured that it was better to have and not need it than to need it and not have it. The problem is that it's really more natural to write with the pen than with the finger, so if you can choose, why should i use touch?

I really am not an artist to use it for drawings and stuff like that but for me it really beats using the mouse or the touchpad when working with libreoffice or working with files, programming, etc.

For software i recomment you to install myPaint. It works on linux and windows and even though it's ment to paint and draw, i find it very useful for writing characters and sentences instead of doing it on real paper (I don't like switching between the wacom pen and the real pen to write on paper).

I don't really find a big difference in size between the bamboo and the intuos.

The wireless feature can be bought separately but i really don't see the point of it. I once went on vacation and took the tablet and the laptop and discovered that the wacom doesn't work if you place it over the laptop's keyboard due to magnetic interference. So this forces me to use wacom standing in a table. I guess wireless is useful if you plan to connect the computer to the big TV and practice characters sitting in the couch.